Friday, April 04, 2014

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 April 2014 - 10 April 2014

It's a good thing I loved the first Captain America movie, Ed Brubaker's run on the comic book, and everybody involved in the new movie, because that's what's playing this week.

Actually, Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn't opening on quite so many screens as I might expect (which is all of them). In this one, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is finding himself uncomfortable with the level of intrusion of SHIELD into civilian life - and facing a mysterious assassin. It looks pretty great, and is playing in 2D and 3D at the Capitol, Apple, Embassy, Jordan's (3D Imax), Boston Common (including 3D Imax), Fenway (including 3D RPX), and the SuperLux.

It's not quite all that's opening at the multiplexes, as Fenway also picks up Jinn, a horror movie featuring Dominic Rains as an auto mechanic who is tormented by the third race of people from Islamic mythology.

They also pick up Maan Tera Hero, a Bollywood film also playing at Apple Cinemas. It's a romantic comedy featuring Varun Dhawan and Ileana D'Cruz as college sweethearts whose romance is derailed by a kidnapping. iMovieCafe also has something called Maan Karate, which sounds crazy, but you need to be able to speak Tamil to find out. Queen also sticks around for another week.

Both Kendall Square & Embassy Square have guests to go along with opening Anita, a documentary on Anita Hill focusing on her appearance at Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings. Ms. Hill herself will be at the Embassy on Friday and the Kendall on Saturday (already sold out). Kendall also has Gloria & Mariama White-Hammond on Friday night and Henry "Skip" Gates on Sunday afternoon.

The Kendall also picks up the second half of Nymphomaniac, with the first half still playing once daily in the afternoon (and also on demand). They've also got Jodorowsky's Dune, a look at the proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert's most famous work by Alejandro Jodorowsky that never happened, but would have united a great many fantastically creative people. And last, but certainly not least, The Missing Picture, Cambodia's nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, a multimedia documentary on Khmer Rouge atrocities taken from director Rithy Panh's own experiences.

The Coolidge also opens The Unknown Known, with famed documentarian Errol Morris doing a profile of Donald Rumsfeld. It mostly plays in the screening room and Goldscreen, but will move to the big room on Sunday afternoon as Morris makes an appearance in person.

The midnight feature this weekend is Big Trouble in Little China, kicking off what looks like a month of out-there fighting. That's late; the weekend morning programs are Mary Poppins on both Saturday and Sunday and The German Doctor (the tale of an Argentine family who lived with Mengele not knowing his true identity) as the Talk Cinema program on Sunday. There's also a full slate of evening programs, from the 35mm Big Screen Classic The 400 Blows on Monday to Open Screen on Tuesday to the Festival screenings on Wednesday and Thursday.

The Somerville Theatre has packed their schedule with 35mm double features this week: To Kill a Mockingbird & the rarely-screened A Thousand Clowns on Saturday, Dr. Strangelove & Easy Rider on Sunday, The Dirty Dozen & Bonnie and Clyde on Wednesday, and The Godfather I & II on Thursday (get there early, as the first starts at 5:30pm). Somerville Subterranean Cinema is fairly busy as well, with offbeat drama See You Next Tuesday playing Friday & Saturday and dance documentary Flex Is Kings on Monday and Tuesday.

The Harvard Film Archive has not yet mailed their spring program out, but the first item on it is Corneliu Porumboiu, Adjective, a retrospective on the Romanian filmmaker which will feature his new film The Second Game at 7pm Friday and a collection of shorter works at 9pm; the series will resume a week later. Saturday the focus is on Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, with Barbaric Land at 7:15 andImages of the Orient at 8:45. After that is A Gregory Markopoulos Prelude, with the avant-garde filmmaker's partner Robert Beavers in attendance to present a set of short films on Sunday and The Illiac Passion on Monday (all on 16mm). There's also a free VES screening of In the Mood for Love on Wednesday.

The Regent Theatre just has one film screening this week, a Premiere/Benefit screening of When Things Go Wrong, a documentary on 1970s Boston band Robin Lane and the Chartbusters directed by its drummer Tim Jackson. There will be live music, and money from this screening will help pay for music rights for a general release.

The Belmont World Film Series goes to Portugal on Monday for Imagine, telling the story of an instructor at a Lisbon school for the blind with a controversial teaching technique. As always, it screens at the Belmont Studio Cinema on Monday.

Emerson's Bright Lights program is co-presenting a 16mm print of George Kuchar's The Devil's Cleavage on Tuesday as part of the LGBT FF, but will also welcome writer/director Lucien Castaing-Taylor to screen his film Leviathan, a documentary shot on a giant fishing boat, in large part by its crew.

The UMass Boston Film Series continues on with O'er the Land, pitched as a fairly general survey of America from director Deborah Stratman, who will be there to introduce and discuss her film at Thursday's free screening.